What We’re Reading
Tesla extends FSD access to “anyone in North America who requests it” (TechCrunch, November 24, 2022)
Elon Musk made a surprise Thanksgiving Eve announcement by tweeting that FSD Beta would be made available “to anyone in North America who requests it from their car screen.” While Tesla’s driver assist features and packages have gone through several iterations, the “full self-driving” option currently is an $15,000 upgrade to the standard Autopilot, and includes “features like assisted steering on highways and city streets, smart vehicle summoning, automatic parking and recognizing and reacting to traffic lights and stop signs.” As the name implies, the software remains in the beta-testing phase, although Tesla engineers recently announced that Tesla has increased FSD simulations to 2 million per week.
Not only does it remain in beta, FSD has increasingly been the target of regulatory scrutiny and litigation. So why is Musk making it broadly available? One reason may be to save face, as he has repeatedly promised Tesla could and would achieve full self-driving by year end. A related reason suggested by the author here is to “give Tesla’s supercomputer Dojo more data to work with” in furtherance of the goal of driverless operation. Yet another is “to ease investor worries and accrue some more revenue.”
The full implications of this broad release remain to be seen. Not surprisingly, the move is drawing criticism, including from Ford Communications Director Mike Levine who tweeted that Tesla is “taking $15,000 from your wallet for a product that’s stuck at Level 2.” Read the responses to both Musk and Levine’s tweets for additional takes from both sides..
Connected Cars & AI Solve Many Highway Traffic Congestion Issues (CleanTechnica, November 27, 2022)
Congestion Impacts Reduction via CAV-in-the-loop Lagrangian Energy Smoothing, known more simply as “CIRCLES,” is a research program involving various U.S. universities and the Tennessee DOT along with Toyota, GM, and Nissan. CIRCLES seeks to “reduce instabilities in traffic flow, called ‘phantom jams,’ that cause congestion and waste energy” by leveraging AI and connected car technology. In recent experiments, CIRCLES researchers demonstrated that introducing automated technologies that allow cars to communicate and work together to develop a traffic plan can reduce phantom jams and other congestion issues and increase fuel efficiency by significant margins. A video showing the experiment results can be viewed here, and another take on the research project from Insurance Journal can be found here.
Tesla now detects Autopilot cheating devices (Electrek, November 25, 2022)
Videos explaining the various “hacks” Tesla drivers have employed to defeat their vehicle’s “hands on wheel” detection system have been making the rounds for years. “It can be as simple as jamming a water bottle in the steering wheel to apply some pressure to some custom-made devices to trick Autopilot’s driver monitoring system.” (NHTSA put an end to the latter.) But Tesla driving analytics company Teslascope recently discovered that Tesla has updated its FSD software to detect these hacks and force disengagement if a defeat device is detected. “Tesla has also been increasingly using its cabin-facing camera to monitor driver attention, and it has been known to send driver warnings when their gaze is not on the road.”